Employee engagement and customer satisfaction go hand in hand. The better the customer service you provide, the more satisfied your customers will be.

But this goes both ways. Your homebuyer reviews can have a direct impact on the morale of your team. There are a number of factors that affect employee performance – work-life balance, career development opportunities, and colleague relationships to name a few – and one of these factors is the appreciation for their work. In fact, 69% of employees say they would work harder if they were more appreciated at their job.

Customer feedback can be a great tool to show your employees they’re making an impact, helping boost productivity and overall performance. It can also help them fill the gaps in weak areas. But it’s not enough to just let the feedback roll in without a plan to use it.

Here are five strategies to enhance employee performance with homebuyer feedback.

Give real-time customer feedback to measure daily performance

Measuring day to day performance provides endless opportunities for employees to see the positive impact they’re making throughout the week. This can help validate your team’s effort and give them more incentive to keep working hard. It also allows team leaders to recognize strong performance patterns and praise their teams right away for doing a great job.

Providing daily customer satisfaction feedback for your team also helps identify areas they can improve and lets them make adjustments quickly. 32% of employees say they wait more than three months for feedback from their managers. So rather than waiting for a quarterly review or monthly meeting to learn about weak areas, they can get a steady flow of insight. When employees are given the tools to improve their performance more easily and see the fruits of their labor they’re more likely to stay on board, even when they receive negative customer feedback.

One of the easiest ways to get real-time feedback is to invest in an online customer experience platform (ideally catered to the homebuilding industry) that provides automated access to feedback and allows you to manage homebuyer and prospect reviews with a dashboard of tools and reporting capabilities – making it simple to analyze key customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction trends and act quickly to make adjustments.

Standardized practices by sharing transparent feedback

It can be tempting to sugar-coat negative customer feedback or hide it from the rest of the company. But transparency throughout the entire organization is critical to keep everyone on the same page and help standardized customer service practices. By sharing customer reviews with everyone you can clearly see which teams are excelling and which need to make some improvements.

If you discover one sales team member has a customer satisfaction rating well above the rest, you can take a look at their positive reviews and find out what’s working so well for them. You can then take that information and turn it into a company-wide initiative to help the rest of the sales team increase their ratings. Having solid proof of why new practices are beneficial to the company will empower your team to make changes.

Negative customer feedback can then uncover a larger problem and help you decide what actions are needed to fix the issue. Maybe you received multiple complaints about a specific lack of communication throughout the homebuilding process and you need to implement a new procedure for keeping homebuyers in the know. Or maybe your entire approach to customer service needs a complete makeover. In any scenario, improvements will make your customers happier, resulting in better reviews and more pleasant interactions with employees – creating a positive, more motivating experience for your team.

Make it resonate with feedback directly from the source

Customer feedback resonates more with employees when they hear it directly from the customer. Receiving filtered versions from a manager or looking at customer satisfaction statistics from homebuyer surveys just doesn’t have the same effect – in fact, these are viewed as less meaningful and less credible. Almost 70% of employees feel more fulfilled at work when they receive consistent, explicit feedback.

Employees take reviews more personally when they can actually hear the voice of the customer or see the customer’s actual response, versus being given a compliment or constructive criticism from a supervisor without tangible customer feedback to support it. In fact, employees that receive direct feedback need less guidance to make improvements in their future customer interactions.

Use feedback to create healthy and friendly competition

Another way to boost employee performance is to turn customer feedback into a fun competition with incentives. People love to be recognized and rewarded for their hard work. Almost 90% of companies have a rewards program in place and incentive programs structured correctly can improve employee performance by 44%. Determine first what you want to measure and how to measure it. Then poll your team to find out what incentives they would actually like to receive. This is to boost morale and enhance performance after all, so it needs to be something they will value. 

Here is a list of ideas:

• Free lunch for the best performing team
• Tickets to sporting events, fairs, or festivals
• Spa day
• Afternoon or Friday off
• Attend a conference of their choice
• Work from home for a week
• Personalized gifts
• Technology accessories
• In-office movie day
• Off-site team activity
• Bonuses

Whatever you decide to give as a reward for great performance, make sure its meaningful and that your incentive program is measuring the metrics you want to be managed.

Share positive feedback to foster a community environment

A supportive environment can be a huge factor in employee performance. Most employees want to be part of a community-focused company where they feel valued and engaged. By sharing positive customer feedback from your homebuyers, you can build a company culture focused on the recognition and encouragement of team members. Furthermore, publicizing positive customer reviews can inspire others to work towards the same goal. Making recognition of top performers a normal part of the culture creates an uplifting atmosphere.

This also opens up an avenue for informal training. Top performers can mentor others, share their knowledge, and build up their colleagues through natural unforced daily interactions. This produces a more collaborative learning environment where everyone leans on each other to succeed and grow the business (good company culture can increase revenue by 400%.)

Related: Want to Improve Customer Experience? Focus on Employee Satisfaction

The bottom line

Giving your employees transparent access to customer feedback can enhance their performance, helping improve customer service and increase your profits. The takeaway is to provide real-time, authentic, and actionable feedback to use those reviews to your advantage. If you haven’t implemented a solution to collect, monitor, and analyze your customer feedback for your homebuilding business yet, it’s never too late.